It says something about the richness of American culture, and of Cleveland as a meeting place of cultures,
that an immigrant from the Netherlands born in Indonesia, who made his
way to America as a teenager by way of Venezuela, has had a strong hand
since 1961 in shaping some of this city’s and the region’s most
distinctive landmarks. Peter van Dijk (a U.S. citizen since 1953) is
not only an award-winning architect and historical preservationist, he
is a man who thinks a lot about the meaning and function of tradition
in the life of a great city

Born
in 1929, the eldest son of Shell Corporation engineer, van Dijk spent
most of his childhood far from the Netherlands—partly because of his
father’s career, partly because of his parents’ determination to keep
him and his two younger brothers away from the war that had soon
engulfed Europe. Van Dijk attributes part of his interest in building
things to the fact that he and his brothers, growing up in relative
isolation in a colony in Venezuela, were forced to make most of their
own toys.

After earning his
undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon (1953) and serving
two years in the army, van Dijk enrolled in the master’s degree program
in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on
the Korean War G.I. Bill. There he would study with the great Louis
Kahn (a major influence) and (then dean) Pietro Belluschi.
Belluschi introduced van Dijk to Eero Saarinen, of St. Louis Arch fame,
who gave van Dijk his first job. He worked four years for Saarinen,
whom he remembers as a “great teacher, never arrogant, and very
supportive of younger talent.”

Van Dijk also spent a year in Rome
on a Fulbright fellowship, immersing himself in the enduring art and
architecture of the Renaissance. “The thoughtful architect,” he once
wrote, “will appraise the spirit which moved other ages”—not for the
purposes of imitating, but of “truly understanding it, which means
seeing the thousand ties which bind architecture to its own
age”—everything, that is, from materials to assumptions about things
like community and our place in the universe.

In the early 1960s three Cleveland
firms were hired to work together on the one million-square-foot
Anthony J. Celebrezze Federal Building; van Dijk was brought to
Cleveland to oversee the project. At its conclusion, all three firms
offered the young architect a job. He opted to go with Schafer, Flynn
& Associates, whose history he held in great respect. Started by
the son of President Garfield in 1905, the firm continually rotated its
lead architects and designers to give new young architects a chance to
make their mark on the world. By 1966, it would be known as Schafer,
Flynn, van Dijk & Associates; later as Flynn, Dalton, van Dijk
& Partners; then as Dalton, van Dijk, Johnson & Partners; and
finally as van Dijk, Westlake, Reed, Leskosky. Van Dijk, in his
turn, stepped down in 2004 as a lead architect with the firm (now known
as Westlake, Reed, Leskosky) but still reports to work every day to do
what he loves and pass on what he knows.

His
distinguished legacy includes Blossom Music Center, the beloved summer
home of the Cleveland Orchestra; Cleveland State University’s Music and
Physical Education buildings and state-of-the-art Natatorium (van Dijk
himself is a champion swimmer); Ursuline College; Cain Park
Amphitheater; University School’s Upper School; John Carroll
University’s Chapel and Rec Center; Westlake Performing Arts and Rec
centers; major medical facilities in Cleveland, Cincinatti and Warren,
Ohio, and Wheeling, West Virginia; and the Temple Hoyne Buell Theater
in Denver, Colorado. A fellow of the Ohio chapter of the American
Institute of Architects (AIA), in 2000 van Dijk was awarded the Gold
Medal, its highest honor.

In the
1970s van Dijk turned his hand to the stunning restoration/updating of
a number of historic buildings in the Cleveland area: notably, the
Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank and the Society (now Key) Bank and
Huntington Bank buildings downtown; five buildings on the campus of
Baldwin Wallace College; the Palace, State and Ohio theaters in
Cleveland’s Playhouse Square; the MK Ferguson Plaza, formerly
Cleveland’s main post office; and the 1981 adaptation of the Old Akron
Post Office into the Akron Art Museum. Van Dijk’s dedication to
historic preservation and creative reuse led to numerous awards from
the Cleveland Restoration Society, the American Institute of
Architects, and National Preservation Honor Awards, among others.

As
a citizen, he says, he feels “a strong obligation” to help “breathe new
life into old buildings and preserve what is still useful and valuable
for future generations to enjoy”—something that is also important, he
strongly believes to the stability of a community. “Just as it is so
much more interesting to have friends of varying ages, races and
diverse backgrounds, a city is more interesting if it contains
buildings of the past along with the buildings of today.” The presence
of complexities and contradictions of style, he says, evoking the title
of Robert Venturi’s classic book on urban architecture, is part of what
makes certain cities so appealing.

Indeed,
one of this city’s, and region’s, signal treasures (the place you take
out-of-town guests in the summertime if you want to blow their socks
off) was created by Peter van Dijk, working in close collaboration with
the resourceful structural engineer Richard M. Gensert.
(For a more extended discussion of some of the innovative features the
two men devised together, see Gensert's Special Citation.) Nestled in a
natural bowl in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the ingeniously
conceived open-air pavilion known as Blossom Music Center was completed
in 1968. Two generations of music lovers, sharing picnic dinners on its
gentle slopes, have felt their spirits quicken at the sight of the
pavilion’s soaring roof, majestic stage and sumptuous wooden interior.
The legendary acoustics, enhanced by van Dijk’s inspired use of the
natural landscape, make Blossom one of the most desirable outdoor
performance destinations in America. If this achievement were not
enough, van Dijk, invited to oversee the recent renovations to this
famed facility, took the opportunity to implement several
long-simmering ideas—thus assuring his place as one of the most
important architects in Cleveland’s history.